Freeman Appoints Five Assistant Professors, One Associate Professor

The A. B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University has added six new tenured and tenuretrack professors to its faculty for 2012-13. Of the six appointments, three are for newly created positions, representing the first phase of an ambitious three-year faculty hiring plan initiated last year that will increase the size of the Freeman School’s research-active faculty by almost 40 percent.

“Our faculty expansion plan is off to an auspicious start with the hiring of this outstanding group of scholars,” said Freeman School Dean Ira Solomon. “Enhancing the academic reputation of the Freeman School is an essential part of our strategic plan, and these exceptional young teachers and researchers will contribute greatly to that effort.”

The new faculty members include Jasmijn Bol, associate professor of accounting; Zhenhua Chen, assistant professor of accounting; Kris Hoang, assistant professor of accounting; Xuhi “Nick” Pan, assistant professor of finance; Robert Prilmeier, assistant professor of finance; and Padmakumar Sivadasan, assistant professor of accounting.

Bol comes to the Freeman School from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she served for five years as an assistant professor of accounting. Bol’s research focuses on managerial accounting, and during her time at Illinois, she authored or co-authored several articles that appeared in peer-reviewed journals and earned numerous awards for her teaching and research, including being named Best Early-Career Researcher in Management Accounting by the American Accounting Association. She received her PhD in management in 2007 from Spain’s IESE Business School.

Chen will earn his PhD in accounting in 2012 from Duke University. His research focuses on understanding the economic and behavioral processes that shape management communication of financial information.

Hoang, who expects to earn her PhD in accounting in 2012 from the University of Alberta, focuses her research on judgment and decision making behavior of auditors, audit committees, corporate directors and executives; auditor-client relationships; and strategic disclosure and financial reporting issues in corporate governances.

An expected 2012 graduate of McGill University with a PhD in finance, Pan focuses his research on asset pricing, commodities, credit risk, derivatives and risk management.

Prilmeier expects to earn his PhD in finance in 2012 from Ohio State University. He served as a finance instructor and teaching assistant at Ohio State, and his research interests include corporate finance, debt contracting, and financial intermediation.

Sivadasan comes to the Freeman School from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he has served as a visiting assistant professor of accountancy since earning his PhD there in 2010. Sivadasan’s research interests include audit markets and financial reporting.

In addition to the six tenured and tenure-track professors, the Freeman School also named 11 faculty members to oneyear appointments as visiting professors. Those new faculty members include Sharon Brown-Hruska, visiting professor of finance; Kenneth Carroll, visiting lecturer in finance; Cristina Danciulescu, visiting assistant professor of finance; Quoc Hoang, lecturer in accounting; Feng Jiang, visiting assistant professor of finance; Larry Leblanc, visiting lecturer in management; Jung Hoon Lee, visiting assistant professor of finance; Beatriz Pereira, lecturer in marketing; Ambika Prasad, visiting lecturer in marketing; Geoffrey Smith, visiting assistant professor of finance; and Hasan Zafer Yuksel, visiting assistant professor of finance.